Best buy and circuit city both have a cyberhome dvr1600 dvd recorder. best buy is $99 and circuit city is $119-20 MIR so $99, but circuit city will match the price AND still honor the rebate, so you end up saving $20 plus the 10% difference thing.

Anyways, I got it home and hooked it up to the coax (rg6) cable out of my satellite receiver which I previously had going to my VCR.

The first thing I noticed was horrible detail in the picture.. worse than my VCR. who knows, maybe this could have been better using S video input.

Anyways, put in a Fuji TY 8x DVD+R for recording. I was hoping that the recorded quality would be better than the displayed quality from the tuner or video in. Unfortunately i never got that far. after pressing the record button and seeing the little red record icon in the upper right of the screen (which was annoying because I couldn't find a way to get it off of there), i noticed the clock start on the recording.. at about 20 seconds it stopped.... then the screen went black very quickly, and a message came up saying "press title to view.." something, and boom my 20 seconds was gone. tried it again, same thing. i couldn't record for more than a minute. actually the time I recorded is moot because it didn't write anything anyways. If I tried to eject the disc, the procedure for "closing" it, it would say the disc is empty.

I tried one more disc to be sure, same result. This is from the same 25 pack i've been using with my plex 716a and haven't had a bad disc yet.

The only good thing I can say is that the picture with movie DVDs was decent.

In JPEG picture view mode, the player did not seem to do well with 3.2 MP images, it compressed them quite a bit. "Zooming" in only showed a pixelated version in the same size it should be displayed in in the first place! I have a daewoo dvd player which displays JPGs at full size and does it well.

Needless to say, it's going back. With the grainy picture, weak JPG display mode, and of course, it doesn't work when recording to fine TY media. Maybe, possibly, it writes to some other media, but when I put all these negatives together, it's not something that I want.

Maybe I just got a lemon.. your mileage may vary.

You gave up too easy, i'm recording thru firewire from my motorola dvr 6412, so all the hd channels i record i can then record to dvd...your a dumbarse ucdcrush!!

You got the Firewire thing to work?

I haven't tried it, but everything I've read has said that the 6412's FireWire port isn't compatible with regular DVD burners. DVD recorders require an inbound 480i signal, and the 6412's FireWire port emits either 480p or some flavor of HD ... it's not supposed to work.

But if it DOES, that'd be great!

Have you successfully recorded regular and HD program on the Cyberhome recorder using the FireWire connection? Did you have to do anything special to get it to work? If this could be done, it'd be great.

AK

I got this unit and can't seem to figure out how to add or delete chapters. I've been thru the book but it does not seem as easy to do with the prior model. Another thing I noticed is on cyberhome's download page you can't download the manual. I got my unit as a open box so it was much cheaper minus the manual.....but now I am seeing that I need this!!!!! Can't seem to be able to do a thing with this compared to the 1500 model...plus it has a " real " remote ...........lol

"I got this unit and can't seem to figure out how to add or delete chapters. I've been thru the book but it does not seem as easy to do with the prior model..."
The only way you can edit a chapter is you have to use dvd+rw not dvd+r
I got my unit 2 weeks ago, after tried to record few disk thru rca cable, s-video cable the quality of a picture is bad in term of color, some how the color is change to really bright for instance, the white cloud over blue sky, you can barely see the cloud(all of these show I recorded is cartoon). Finally, I tried the coax cable, voilla the picture is the same as you watch directly from tunner source. I did not mention that I did update the latest firmware for my unit dvr1600MU, the reason was I could not finalize my first dvd+r. After I updated firmware, I don't have problem with finalized any more. Now I change to use dvd+rw, so I don't have to worry about finalize anymore, also can use the disk over and over again. Sorry for write it too long, this is my first post :-)
btw. for less than 100 buck I could not complain.

Just in case anyone is interested, the avs forum has a lengthy thread regarding this machine. Lots of positive, some negative responses.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=544417

You'l learn lots of stuff here.

John

I bought one of those about a month ago... I really like the way its menus are designed, everything is very intuitive and easy to use, but the product's quality is crap. The first one I got had a "sound drag" problem. Basically, if you record for half an hour or longer, the sounds starts to "drag". Not good. So I exchanged it for another unit, it worked for about half an hour, and then just died - wouldn't even power on. I'm done with Cyberhome. It's a shame, it was very promising and the price was right... but I'm not bying a third one!